


Shall I Bring You the Sound of Poisons?

by bestworstcase (windrattlestheblinds)



Series: The Ones Who Bloom in the Bitter Snow [2]
Category: Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (Cartoon), Tangled (2010)
Genre: Bitter Snow, Body Horror, Character Study, Gen, Oneshot, hurt/comfort but in like an eldritch way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26731528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windrattlestheblinds/pseuds/bestworstcase
Summary: Behind the brittle mask of her commitment, she has always felt thecontradiction;devout and doubting, scorched to the root in the ashes of everything she loved. A flowering bitterness. In the absence of her Lady she could imagine comfort; the reality is… harder.
Relationships: Zhan Tiri & Sirin (OC)
Series: The Ones Who Bloom in the Bitter Snow [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1721755
Comments: 3
Kudos: 23





	Shall I Bring You the Sound of Poisons?

**Author's Note:**

> This is something of a coda to chapter twenty-three of [_A Blanker Whiteness of Benighted Snow_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23888713/chapters/57429667). If you’ve not read _Benighted,_ you… are welcome to give this a read regardless, but it is presented sans-context so caveat emptor.
> 
> CW: some gore, and **body horror.**
> 
> As always, comments are very appreciated! ♥

The walls glint in candlelight. Delicate frost-ferns crawl through the open windows and grow in forlorn whorls over the neglected plaster; Sirin has not been home since Tároshdhan, and the cottage is glazed in wintry neglect. She sets the candle on the table and sits. Black flecks shimmer in the mist when she exhales.

Pain chews through her when she lifts the wreckage of her arm onto the table; little teeth, sharp as needles. She peels her sleeve away in ragged strips, baring the– she cannot even think of it as flesh. Putrid meat, flayed messily from greasy bone, weeping mingled blood and tar. Magic—

Sirin examines it, unblinking. The first time she dipped her hand into her Lady’s pitch and asked and felt power answer, horror seared itself into her skin too; but she has grown numb to it in the intervening months. And her own wellbeing means very little to her, anymore.

“I asked you,” murmurs the Lady herself, sulkily, “not to.”

She looks up. Zhan Tiri oozes along the rafters, a sullen and insubstantial smear of blackness in the gloom. Shadowy tendrils curl against the wooden beam, twitching in the candlelight.

“I had no choice.”

An irascible _click_ spills out of the feathering dark. “There is always choice.”

“If you had alternatives I would have loved to hear them.”

“Sugracha—”

Sirin looks away, her jaw tightening. The candle-flame dances, then gutters in the swampy ripple of Zhan Tiri’s sigh. She grips the edge of the table, scraping the fingertips of her good hand along its splintering underside, and counts silently to ten.

Then, “Is she not otherwise engaged?”

Zhan Tiri does not answer this, but her silence has a waspish sting. Sirin seethes in mute frustration.

“You poor thing,” Zhan Tiri drawls at length. “Denied your justice and skewered by your pride. How it must _sting._ My dear little thorn-bird; was it worth it?”

“Don’t _patronize_ me.”

Talons rasp against the wood, and a low chuckle blooms from the darkness; a flaking sound, shedding petals of ink. Zhan Tiri sloughs down from the rafters in dribbles of pitch and vegetable sludge. A slender polecat arches out of the puddling black, tattered pelt split open over spindling ribs stuffed with bramble; her head more fox than ferret, crowned with an elegant pair of curling horns. Small globules of tar cling to her matted fur.

“Sirin.” Her voice is a slippery croon, sliding through pearly fangs. “Your grief is not a heresy; nothing is desecrated by your rage.” She slinks closer, motes of viridescent light glittering in the empty sockets of her eyes. “Do you think me ungrateful?”

Briars prick in the hollows of her lungs. Behind the brittle mask of her commitment, she has always felt the _contradiction;_ devout and doubting, scorched to the root in the ashes of everything she loved. A flowering bitterness. In the absence of her Lady she could imagine comfort; the reality is… harder.

“Fealty to you is its own reward,” Sirin murmurs.

“Such a votary answer,” Zhan Tiri says, bristling. “You are good at that. Strut on your ascetic stage and _bleed_ if you must; but do not _lie_ to—”

“Thank you for saving her.” A lacerated whisper. It ravels behind her eyelids again, tableau soaked in blood and moonlight. The captain framed by pitiless stars; a lifted sword, her niece on the ground. Shame grows in thickets, poison-barbed, in the sickening garden of her gratitude.

Zhan Tiri makes a quiet rattling noise, of winter-barren branches in the breeze. “You have lost so much, my dear.”

All her jagged edges. Her ruptured heart has fangs of its own. “Shall I grovel for you, then, my Lady? Prostrate myself and present my wounds for your enjoym— _ah!_ ”

The rotted pulp of her arm shreds beneath the swipe of Zhan Tiri’s claws, and agony scathes like lightning under her skin. Sirin lurches, gasping, bowed by it. Necrotic spots feather in her eyes.

“You have _suffered,_ ” Zhan Tiri snarls into her ear; and though for weeks she has anticipated the Lady’s fangs in her throat, this riffle of fetid breath against her neck rouses a primal fear. She stills. A whimper ferments in her lungs. “…I am no stranger to pain. My dear, my thorn-bird; the song of your afflictions brings me no pleasure. I would not ask for more.”

“Blood from stones,” Sirin croaks.

The table presses cold into her brow. Fangs aglint with candlelight swallow her sight; Zhan Tiri purrs, and the smell of stagnant brine wafts against her skin.

“Any seed can grow.” A gangrenous tongue flicks between her teeth, brushing daintily against Sirin’s cheek. “In even the bitterest soil; life persists. Close your eyes.”

“My–?”

“This part,” Zhan Tiri says silkily, “will hurt.”

Sirin meets the simmering green stare until her skull throbs with a vertiginous ache; when she shuts her eyes, afterimages splinter the darkness. Like thorns, or like roots crumbling pliant soil. Zhan Tiri arches beneath her chin, damp fur gliding over the denticulate ridge of her spine. Small paws sink into the hollow of her shoulder. A sleight weight. Warm.

Her teeth press in, delicate, _sharp_.

A strangled cry fractures between the fingers Sirin clamps over her mouth as her flesh shears away in Zhan Tiri’s jaws. Serrated pain claws her to the bone; cut with shock. She shakes, and her Lady chews.

Soft wet sounds.

Putrid meat.

“I know it hurts, I know. Hush.” A nuzzle, tucked into her shoulder between the unfolding layers of torment. Sirin moans. “I have tasted all your fears, dearheart. They have carved so many pieces from you, my dauntless thorn-bird, and what am I but another shrike among the briars? A barb, piercing flesh. Oh, Sirin, my dear, whatever I take from you I will return a hundredfold. You are perfect. You are perfect, and were I free I would have cared for you; sheltered you, tended you, until you flowered into greatness. You would not fear to walk among my thorns—”

She sobs, awash in pain.

“—it will end, it will end. You are so brave. You have endured so much, for so long. The night always ends, my dear. Winter bows to spring. That is the way of things, and you will live to see the thaw. You will drink of the summer and sink down your roots in richer soil; and every weed that chokes you now will bleed to slake your thirst. The last time pays for all. There will come a reckoning and _every_ hurt will be answered. Even this, my thorn-bird, dearheart; even this. I vow it.”

Her crooning twines around the rhythmic, ravenous clicking of teeth. The threads of her meaning unravel then; roses and thorns, currents of warm affection laced through the excruciating waves of a gelid black sea. Sirin howls, guttural cries, babbling pleas.

She slips away, and then, with the furtive reluctance of a winter dawn, returns to ashen fatigue. The pain sears itself to numb and aching bedrock. Sirin whimpers.

“…Oh, darling.”

Warmth settles against her cheek. Zhan Tiri nips at her chin, contritely gentle, as Sirin cards her fingers through the fur. She has never dared before, when her Lady slipped close enough to touch; but she feels hazily as if she has earned the right. It is silken, oily, redolent with floral decay. Pleasant, in its way.

“It could not be salvaged,” Zhan Tiri murmurs. “This… fragment of mine is too frail a vessel; a storm can be seeded piece by piece, given time, but a battle—”

“My arm,” Sirin says, ragged, lost into the fur, “seems a fitting casualty. I– I-”

Magic. Invited in, seeping beneath her skin, decay rooted in meat and blood. She thought she _understood;_ until tonight, when Zhan Tiri sank hooks into her flesh and dredged something monstrous and ecstatic from the depths. She has spent her life splashing in puddles, blind all along to the splendor of the sea.

“—Hubris,” Zhan Tiri says, sounding wry. She nibbles Sirin’s chin with greater insistence, and Sirin lifts her head from the table, obedient, to look.

The bones of her arm, picked clean, glistening white; cradled in slender black vines that crawl down from her shoulder and engulf her hand in spidery tendrils. She flexes her fingers, and the vines furl the little bones into the vague resemblance of a fist. Motion– stiff, inhuman, but painless. She blinks.

“An inadequate replacement.” Zhan Tiri slinks into the crook of her other arm and lounges there. Her pelts shimmers, wicking up the dancing shadows of the candle. Mycelium creeps along her neck, sprouting small, spongy mushrooms behind her ears. The fur of her chest is caked in bits of gristle and grime; she purrs, exposed ribs fanning open and then closing again as she stretches. “But a temporary one, also.”

“It… will serve,” Sirin says. Votary answers. She flips her hand over, and back, watching the bones of her forearm rotate. Delicate tendrils web between them. She feels very light-headed. “Thank…you?”

Her Lady hums. “You’re surprised.”

“You _ate—_ ” A hysterical snicker garbles the words, and Sirin lowers her forehead to the table again, breathing hard. “It has– it has been—a night of– I do not… know quite how to respond.”

“Respond however you want,” Zhan Tiri drawls. “You have what you wanted. Socona liberated; a few days to breathe while Corona gathers itself for its retaliation. Your niece survived—”

“—and I’m grateful—”

“—and _your_ injuries have been mended. In… a sense.” She pauses. “Rest. You are exhausted. Close the windows; kindle the hearth, warm yourself. Bathe. _Sleep._ Impale yourself on your worries again tomorrow, if it pleases you so. But rest, dearheart.”

Sirin shuts her eyes. Tiredness does crowd every joint in her body; aftershocks of the battle, and the sticky backwash of pain, thread her muscles with leaden veins. She is almost too weary to protest.

“Why are you like this?” she murmurs.

Zhan Tiri’s only answer to that is another rumbling purr, rich with amusement, followed by a plaintive whine when Sirin pulls her arm away to stand, and _that,_ Sirin supposes as she closes the windows she left open on Tároshdhan, is perhaps all the answer she has the energy for.


End file.
